At Relief
Society this month we have begun a getting to know you better program. Since some
of us haven’t been able to attend church for three months we are to tell the
people we minister too something about ourselves, with the hope that you will
tell us something back about you. The prompt today was to tell you a childhood
memory. Here is one of mine.
Welcome To My Neighborhood
Wendy Hauer
I never really
liked bears, but my Dad did.
He loved to take us to the zoo,
and sure enough we always gravitated to
the bear exhibits first. His favorite was the sun bear, a
tall lanky brown bear with a
yellow patch on his stomach.
At 5 feet at least it looked tall to us when we were
younger and shorter.
He has an extremely long narrow tongue for getting
into bee hives and is sometimes called a honey bear.
They would stand on either side
of the fence and stare at each other. Daring,
who would be the first to flinch? My dad always won.
He had a way of taking chances
that made my mom mad. One day, driving
through Yellowstone Park we saw a black bear on the side of
the road. My
dad pulled up, rolled down the window and threw jellybeans
across the car
roof at the bear.
“Don’t Feed the
Bears!” Don’t Feed the Bears!” My mom
screamed. The bear
was on her side and she was the one who would be attacked first. The four of us in
the back seat begged him to quit too. We were too young to
be afraid of the bears,
but we wanted the jellybeans.
I guess it was
natural to be carefully comfortable living around bears. We
lived in a house in the mountains on the edge of the forest.
Wild life was abundant
and we learned to live in their neighborhood as they live in
ours. It seems that every
year we had visits from the bears, especially during the
droughts. The apple tree
was particularly vulnerable to their munching and it was
outside my bedroom
window.
Other bears loved to break into
the neighbor’s hot tubs for a warm drink.
Janet, who
lived up the street a few houses made two apple pies one fall and
left them on the windowsill to cool while she went to town.
Her daughter Mary came
home for a visit about the same time that the bear was ready
for a snack. Hearing
the noise of the bear entering the house by the window, Mary
quietly got up, shut
the door and left to call the forest service bear retrieval
department from a safer
distance.
Another year a
neighbor came to tell me that there was a bear sighting. A high school boy was
doing his homework at the table in his kitchen two houses
down the road from us. Hearing a noise, he looked up and out
into the back yard.
There, on the deck was a black
bear trying to get into the house through the screen
door. Coolly keeping his head, Paul closed and locked the
glass door. The forest
service arrived and the bear headed quickly to one of the
taller Ponderosa pine trees
at the back of the property. Taking my two-month old
daughter with me we walked
down to the house to watch. We sat on the deck as the forest
service men shot a
tranquilizing dart into the bear’s side. The bear turned,
looked at the dart, and
calmly picked it out of his rump, dumping it to the ground.
Three darts later he was
still feisty and determined to stay in his tree.
“Give him a lethal dose Joe”, the boss shouted.
One more shot and the bear
tumbled to the forest floor. We had been told to head
into the house the moment he landed in case he hadn’t been knocked
out yet. So, we
hustled inside, the adventure over. When he was trussed and netted,
we headed back
out of the house to make sure he was still alive and would
be transported to another
mountain hundreds of miles away to continue his life
pillaging another
neighborhood.
My daughter
doesn’t remember this adventure, but has inherited her
grandfather’s appreciation for honey and bears; at the zoo.
